PlayStation 4 architect on welcoming developers

Wanted to make sure PS4 wasn't a "puzzle" like PS3

PlayStation 4 lead system architect Mark Cerny was thinking about the console in late 2007--just a year after PlayStation 3 was released. He wasn't the architect at the time, Cerny told Gamasutra, but Sony saw promise in his ideas: one of which was "that a very developer-centric approach to the design of the PlayStation 4 would just make things go more smoothly overall."

"The biggest thing was that we didn't want the hardware to be a puzzle that programmers would be needing to solve to make quality titles," Cerny said.

The PlayStation 3's Cell processor was billed as a unique powerhouse, but its idiosyncratic architecture made it a difficult beast to tame. On Cerny's first tour of developers, it became clear they wanted two things: a lot of unified memory, and an 8-core CPU.

PS4 has both, and Cerny said Sony's experience building the Vita into a friendlier development environment laid the groundwork for its new home console.

"We took Vita as an opportunity to rework the tool chain and the development environment, and I think that you saw that the response from the development community [to those changes] was very good," says Cerny. "That meant that with PS4 we already had this philosophy in place--that we wanted our tools to be much richer and much more accessible to our developers, even in the launch timeframe."